fight for a song: Robert Schumann: Liederkreis op. 39

Karolina Augustyn SopranEliza Pawłowska pianoforte

Robert Schumann's “Liederkreis” Op. 39 was written in 1840, the famous “year of song”, in which the composer created almost half of all his work in this genre. Schumann composed a total of 21 poems by Joseph von Eichendorff, twelve of which were included in this cycle. He himself considered it a special work: in a letter to Clara Wieck dated May 22, 1840, he called “Liederkreis” his “most romantic” work. The poems used did not originally form a single whole — only their choice and order gave them a new, musical dramaturgy.

Its true protagonist becomes a romantic landscape: forest, night, moon, remoteness and a constant sense of wandering. Nature, however, is not a decoration, but a reflection of the inner states of man. Delight is adjacent to melancholy, a sense of strangeness with a desire for closeness, and reality almost imperceptibly passes into the world of dream and imagination. This happens, for example, in the famous “Mondnacht”, where the image of the night landscape gradually becomes a metaphor for the soul finding its way home.

The whole cycle leads from the F minor of the first song to the bright F major final “Frühlingsnacht”. Schumann thus closes this journey full of anxiety with an almost ecstatic gesture — as if, after all the experiences of strangeness, loneliness and darkness, it was possible to find the place to which one belongs.

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Karolina Augustyn photo by Sylwia Matyja